Have A Hopstastic Green Easter!

I love Easter. Maybe it’s because it’s in the spring, maybe it’s the egg dyeing or maybe it’s the fun of finding those eggs.

When I was I kid we lived 3,000 miles away from the rest of my parents’ families so every holiday was big. But there was just always something extra great about Easter. So when I had kids I was super excited to keep up with the super fun tradition.

First there’s dyeing the Easter eggs which is fun, messy and all around awesome.

Last year I read about making dye out of food, which sounded awesome and super green. Don’t recall me writing about that? Well that’s probably because I never actually made any food dyes. So this year I was so totally going to do it.

So I looked up how to make dyes out of food. I found that most anything that will stain would make a great egg dye; beets, cherries, blueberries, coffee and spices like turmeric and chili powder.

The process is simple enough: combine chosen food with 1 quart water, 2 tablespoons vinegar and simmer for 20-30 minutes. Then let the mixture cool and add your hard-boiled eggs and let them soak for about an hour. You don’t get that immediate satisfaction of conventional egg dyes, but you also don’t get all the weird ingredients like maltodextrin and yellow #5 either.

The natural process may take a little more time but I think it’s worth it. I like that the kids are involved in making the dyes and that they do have to practice a little patience, something every kid could use a little more of. ;)

Plus it always seemed like the egg dyeing went by too fast, it doesn’t seem like that will be a problem with this method.

Tyler and Dylan always liked the kit that came with the white crayon so they could draw on the egg before dyeing it. So I’m going to go through the huge collection of crayons we have so they can still draw on their eggs.

I liked this site and this one plus this video for more dyeing instructions.

So now that we’ve got dyeing done, onto filling up the plastic ones and the Easter baskets.



Tyler likes candy but not that much, Dylan could eat it till he exploded and neither one is the least bit interested in stuffed toys. So with that in mind I pretty much have just started skipping filling the baskets with stuff and have just stuck with the plastic eggs.

Over the years I’ve done little toys, a little candy and quarters. The biggest hit is always the quarters. Now that they’re a little older I do dollar bills. They love that they get to go buy a toy and I don’t waste money on “Easter” toys they don’t care about.

I still like to add a little candy and I’m really liking the Milk Chocolate Hoppy Treats from Endangered Species Chocolate for this year.

To be honest, I think the boys’ care less about what’s in the eggs as they do about finding them. Which is, of course, awesome.

Do you have plans for Easter? Is there anything you do to try to make it a little greener? If you don’t have kids, do you hide eggs anyways because it’s just fun? ;)

And don’t worry, I’ll be sure to let you know how our adventures in natural egg dyeing go!

And yes, the photos are from '06, but they're my fave!